Modernist whimsy: entertaining difficulty in the work of Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, and Stevie Smith

现代主义奇思妙想：玛丽安·摩尔、格特鲁德·斯坦和史蒂维·史密斯作品中的娱乐难题

• 批准号: 2773616
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Southampton
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2773616
• 关键词: Modernist; whimsy; entertaining; difficulty; work

My thesis is interested in what happens when we centre whimsy in critical discourse and examine the writers and poetical forms it attaches to. This is in response to the note of embarrassment that whimsy has sounded in a literary-critical context: in the modernist period, it is often used as a dismissal, describing a poetic mood or literary device that is overly fanciful. My research proceeds from Will May's crucial observation that whimsy has also been an 'expedient' category for critics to use, particularly of women poets. I take his arguments as an invitation to centre the playfulness of modernist women's poetry and interrogate the ways in which this playfulness has been disparaged. My thesis thus looks both at the wayswhimsy works within texts and the ways it has moulded our critical understandings of texts as part of a feminist reframing of whimsy's aesthetic and critical value. Through analysis of the poetry of Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore and Stevie Smith, my contention is twofold: first, that as a gendered aesthetic category, whimsy works unevenly to sabotage the reception of some poets and not others; and second, that an awareness of the structures that make whimsy a fraught mode figures prominently in the work of Stein, Moore and Smith, who organise these tensions into a complex form of self-fashioning.Whimsy in the twentieth century arises as a category in contrast to difficulty, that hallmark of high modernism whose legacy continues to shape conceptions of art and professionalised literary criticism. As Leonard Diepeveen writes, difficulty has 'become the necessary condition for canonization'. Whimsy, as 'failed' art, might seem to be another means of policing this distinction between the serious and the throwaway. The contention of this thesis, however, is that the association of whimsy with critical in scrutability has given such texts and writers the licence to evade aesthetic and critical conventions. May writes in a gloss on an 1892 review of Emily Dickinson's poetry that '"whimsical" stands in for a term themale reader cannot find for a poetics he cannot decipher'. In this formulation, whimsy replaces difficulty as part of a gendered reaction to a poem he finds challenging. My argument centres on the challenge whimsy here inscribes, considering whimsy as its own complex category, and not just a dismissive substitute. I proceed from the 'working definition' of whimsy that Deborah Bowman offers in her paper on the readymades, which drives towards its puzzling demands: 'something which makes you wonder, with allpossible tonalities: Imagine taking that seriously.' Staging whimsy as a double-minded invitation to dismiss something and to entertain it - in other words, less a quality of an object than it is an entreaty to do something with it - her definition parallels Diepeveen's emphasis on the experiential quality of difficulty, which he describes as an 'interaction between text and reader'. Rather than describing the aesthetic properties of an object, difficulty and whimsy therefore describe a relationship with an object, and the set of affectsthis entails.This understanding provides the terms of my interrogation of whimsy as a critical concept, and my use of it as a tool to read Stein, Moore and Smith, building on the limited scholarship that exists on the category. Where May, in separate essays, has addressed the question of whimsy's role in 'contain[ing] the intellectual role of women in society' (with reference to Dorothy Parker, Moore, and Sylvia Plath) and its use as ethical excuse (with reference to Ezra Pound), my PhD will bring these perspectives together to demonstrate that the risks of whimsy are fundamentally gendered.

我的论文感兴趣的是，当我们在批评话语中以奇思妙想为中心，并考察它所依附的作家和诗歌形式时，会发生什么。这是为了回应在文学批评语境中，奇思妙想听起来令人尴尬的音符：在现代主义时期，它经常被用作一种解雇，描述一种过于幻想的诗歌情绪或文学手段。我的研究源于威尔·梅的重要观察，即奇思妙想也是批评家们使用的一个“权宜之计”类别，尤其是对女诗人。我把他的论点看作是一个邀请，以现代主义女性诗歌的游戏性为中心，并询问这种游戏性被掩盖的方式。因此，我的论文着眼于奇思妙想在文本中的运作方式，以及它塑造我们对文本的批判性理解的方式，作为女性主义重新构建奇思妙想的美学和批判价值的一部分。通过对格特鲁德·斯泰因、玛丽安·摩尔和史蒂夫·史密斯的诗歌的分析，我的论点有两个方面：首先，作为一个性别化的美学范畴，奇思妙想不均衡地破坏了一些诗人的接受，而另一些诗人则没有;第二，在斯坦、摩尔和史密斯的作品中，他们将这些张力组织成一种自我塑造的复杂形式。在世纪，奇思妙想作为一个与困难相反的类别出现，这是高度现代主义的标志，其遗产继续塑造艺术和专业化文学批评的概念。正如伦纳德迪佩芬所写的那样，困难已经“成为圣徒化的必要条件”。奇思妙想，作为“失败”的艺术，似乎是另一种区分严肃和一次性的手段。然而，本文的论点是，将奇思妙想与批判性联系在一起，给了这些文本和作家逃避审美和批判惯例的许可证。梅在1892年对艾米丽·狄金森诗歌的评论中写道：““异想天开”代表了一个术语，一个读者找不到的、他无法解读的诗学。“在这种表述中，奇思妙想取代了困难，成为他对一首他认为具有挑战性的诗的性别反应的一部分。我的论点集中在奇思妙想在这里所写的挑战上，把奇思妙想看作是它自己的复杂类别，而不仅仅是一个不屑一顾的替代品。我从黛博拉·鲍曼在她关于现成品的论文中对奇思妙想的“工作定义”出发，这一定义推动了奇思妙想令人困惑的要求：“让你想知道的东西，具有所有可能的音调：想象一下认真对待它。“将奇思妙想作为一种双重思想的邀请，既要摒弃某些东西，又要娱乐它--换句话说，与其说是一个物体的性质，不如说是一种对它做些什么的恳求--她的定义与Diepeveen对困难的经验性质的强调相一致，他将其描述为“文本与读者之间的互动”。因此，困难和奇思妙想并不是描述一个物体的美学属性，而是描述与一个物体的关系，以及由此产生的一系列影响。这种理解为我提供了将奇思妙想作为一个批判性概念进行审问的术语，以及我将其作为阅读斯坦、摩尔和史密斯的工具，并建立在对这一范畴的有限学术研究之上。梅在单独的文章中谈到了奇思妙想在“遏制女性在社会中的智力作用”（参考多萝西帕克，摩尔和西尔维亚普拉斯）及其作为道德借口（参考以斯拉磅）的作用问题，我的博士学位将把这些观点结合在一起，以证明奇思妙想的风险从根本上是性别化的。